Kotsu Kotsu

Recently I heard that a colleague had had bad year. Her boyfriend broke up with her, she lost her job, and on the day in question, her sweet, loving dog bit her in the face. Now, while all these are things no one wants to have happen, I was interested that she grouped them together to define the year as a bad one. We construct entire landscapes of self image and judgment, based on some pretty insubstantial evidence! Finding some quiet time to be mindful of inner thoughts can really help illuminate this. It's astounding how many of our simple thoughts or even feelings in the body are accompanied by a judgment or an emotion. Wow. My brain just seems hard-wired to calculate, measure, and compare me to others, and to make predictions about the future based on my calculations and comparisons. That would be fine if the predictions were useful, but, frankly, most of them are not. By the time I'm consciously aware of these thoughts, they seem inevitable or given, for example: ...

Photo by Bill O'Neill In August I played at a fiddle contest. No, I didn't win. My goal was to make it through both tunes without stopping. And I achieved my goal. After all, I've only been playing for a couple of years. In fact, before I played, I said something to the effect of: "I've only been playing for two and a half years - I'm saying this not to get your pity, but to tell you that if you want to try something that seems really hard, even at an 'advanced age,' go for it!" After the contest was over, the musicians were starting a little jam session. Someone came up to me and told me how much what I said had inspired him. He said, "I really want to play again. I played when I was in high school, and everyone really thought I was good then." "Well, why don't you come and play with us now? Someone will loan you a violin!" "No, no, no, I couldn't do that, they would laugh at me!" "OK. If y...

I was an editor in broadcast TV for about 20 years. One thing I noticed was that when you cut from one shot to the next, your eye focuses on the last frame before that cut, and you remember it. It was really important to know, because if a woman is being interviewed, and you edit to something else, and she starts to stick out her tongue or close her eyes before you cut, you really notice that frame. If she's smiling and starts to frown, you remember that. But if you cut just before the frown starts, you remember the big beautiful smile. I used to edit a lot of music videos and documentaries, and sometimes it was really fun to try to make that last frame before the cut something memorable.  I've realized that the same idea holds true for my thoughts. If I'm thinking about something, working on something, turning something over in my mind, and then I switch to thinking about something else, the thought that lingers is usually the last thought that I had before I ...

I encountered a fantastic  blog post by Tara Brach, a writer I recommend highly for her insight into how we can be happier and be the person we imagine we could be. Here's the opening paragraph: "In the book  My Stroke of Insight , brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor explains that the natural life span of an emotion— the average time it takes for it to move through the nervous system and body—is only a minute and a half, a mere ninety seconds. After that, we need thoughts to keep the emotion rolling. So, if we wonder why we lock into painful emotional states like anxiety, depression, or rage, we need look no further than our own endless stream of inner dialogue .  Modern neuroscience has discovered a fundamental truth:  Neurons that fire together, wire together. When we rehearse a looping set of thoughts and emotions, we create deeply grooved patterns of emotional reactivity. This means that the more you think and rethink about certain experiences, the stro...

"Which is stronger: breathing in or breathing out?" Most of us don't think much about our breathing, but if you do, you may realize that most of us naturally exhale (breathe out) when we do something requiring physical effort. Just try lifting one end of a heavy couch: we naturally breathe out as we lift. And try again while you're breathing in: not so easy! So, it's not surprising that in fitness training, in yoga, in martial arts, the emphasis is usually on the exhalation for any movement that requires physical effort. As for the inhalation: in most martial arts, the opponent's inhalation is considered to be a weak point - something you can seek out and exploit. In the practice of Kokikai Aikido , too, I've always thought of the in-breath as a weak point. Sensei has said that we shouldn't make our breathing obvious, lest our opponents use it against us. The Strength of the In-Breath But inhalation can be strong as well. Consider t...

Everyone wants to feel like they are truly unique, different, better, the best , even though, statistically, with more than 314 million people in the U.S. and 7 billion in the world, well, there's just no way.* In my case, I want to be the best musician, the best at aikido, the best mom, the best driver, the best at everything . Maybe not literally, but somehow deep down I am always comparing. If someone else is better, at some level that means I'm just not good enough. And out of 314 million people, there's always someone who's better. Sometimes this means I'm never satisfied and always pushing to be better. Other times it's depressing and makes me want to give up. And from what I've seen, I have a lot of company in looking at things this way. It doesn't help that there's a strong message in our culture that competition is good. Competition supposedly drives us to work harder, be more productive, invent more and accomplish more. But on some...

A lot of people ask me what aikido has to do with music and here's the essential reason: Musicians, understandably, spend a lot of time thinking about music - learning tunes, listening to their tone, practicing technique. But in aikido I learned that there is a hugely important element to practicing and playing, which is to  practice mind-body coordination . This is nothing esoteric. It has to do with paying attention to your body in a specific way while you are playing. Go to the gym any day and you'll see rows of people on the treadmill, elliptical and stair machines, doing exactly the opposite . Many of us who are trying to learn a physical skill, whether it's a musical chord progression, throwing a perfect curve ball, or a tango "ocho," assume that doing the drills/exercises is primarily a physical activity. In practicing aikido I learned how to coordinate my mind and my body. And I learned why it leads to much better results. To improve mind-body c...

My instructor, Dan McDougall, often suggests that beginning students try picking one of the Four Basic Principles to focus on during ki development exercises. Here are a few specific ideas that may help during ki development exercises: Keep One Point :  Find your  one point . Try imagining that this point is very heavy and is grounding you, making you balanced and strong. As more movement is introduced into the ki exercises, see if you can keep your sense of  one point  just as strong.  Unlike gravity,  one point  is an idea, and maintaining it is totally under your control, so if you want to feel heavy, you can, but you can also feel light if you choose.  You may want to try imagining your  one point  to be very small, or imagine it to be infinitely large. Or you may feel its enough to simply feel it is there. Entire treatises have been written on one point. It's best not to get too carried away, just keep it simple...

I have long believed that we pretty much construct the world we live in from our  thoughts .  I can't blame people brought up in an objective materialist tradition for thinking that sounds kind of "New Age-y." It makes a certain amount of sense that if you mistrust people, they will mistrust you in return, and vice versa. But constructing your entire reality? Bah! OK. It's just a theory and I'm testing it through personal observation. So, here's one experiment: "If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion." - Dalai Lama For a while I have been working on compassion by noticing my negative thoughts about others and...well... substituting alternate thoughts . I have a lot of thoughts about others that I definitely would not want to share. Certain situations are really fertile for nasty thoughts: trying to find a parking space; in line in the grocery store; in the changing room of Target...S...

I often feel some conflict when it comes to my ego. Being a musician and practicing aikido both highlight this tension for me. On the one hand, I understand that humility is good. It's important to recognize the talents and achievements of others. In my study of Buddhist teachings I've even heard that there's something called "no-self"  that I'm supposed to be aiming for, where I realize the interconnectedness of all things and lose my ego. On the other hand, to stand in front of a room full of people and play music, or to teach them self defense, I need a really strong sense of confidence about my ability and who I am. Of course the martial arts has a strong tradition of respecting and acknowledging those who are more experienced. Even though I have been practicing Kokikai Aikido  for more than 20 years, there are many current teachers in Kokikai who had been practicing for 10, 20 or more years when I started.  And of course our founder, Shuji Maruyam...

The Comedy Rule of Three Back in the days when I was editing broadcast television, I once worked on a couple of episodes of Late Night with David Letterman . I'll never forget the producer, the legendary  Hal Gurnee , talking about how comedy had to adhere to the "rule of three." If you get hit on the head once, it's bad. Twice, it's worse. Three times: it's funny. Just like comedy, the stories we tell are made more memorable when things happen in sets of three. Recently a colleague told me he'd had a bad year. He lost his job, his truck was totalled, and then his beloved dog bit his face. I agree, he has had a bad year. The dog bite was definitely the capper. I'm ok with telling funny stories about my life to make other people laugh. On the other hand, I have realized that I'm constantly creating a running narrative about my life, that I tell myself .  I've seen first-hand that while this self-narrative may seem to reflect reality, i...

Of the four principles of Kokikai Aikido, the one I have most difficulty explaining is Positive Mind. It's hard to grasp how changing your mind can affect your physical ability. Scientists concluded way back in the 19th century that the structure of the brain is fixed after childhood, and the idea is so  normative in our culture that we don't even realize it's a belief; it's just the way it is. As an instructor I'm aware that I risk my students thinking of me as a flaky New Age thinker by proposing Positive Mind as an essential part of our practice. It is helpful when I can back up my assertions with scientific results. Recently in a class at the YWCA Princeton , Maruyama Sensei said that thinking "I Can" has a physical effect on the brain, helping make your brain more organized. He may have been referring to a recent study from a group of Japanese researchers  showing that praise following motor training directly facilitates the consolidation of...

When he teaches aikido, Sensei talks about positive mind. Positive mind is one of the four basic principles of Kokikai Aikido . We usually think about positive mind in two ways. The first is feeling confident, believing in yourself, and letting go of any thoughts about "I can't" or "I'm weak" or "I'm not good enough" or "This isn't going to work out well for me." That's the idea Sensei is most likely to talk about when he teaches. When he says "remove impurities," he's talking about something like this, rather than something your Sunday School teacher might have said! The second way of thinking of positive mind isn't really different, but we tend to think of it as different, because we don't usually pay attention to how the mind and the body are connected. This has to do with the way your state of mind affects your body. You can see directly how this is true. Stand up in your best, natural stanc...